With over seventeen years’ experience leading communication, training and development projects around the world, Monica is skilled in relating with people from a variety of industry, ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Her specialty is helping to develop global skills and mindsets among U.S. Americans to succeed among culturally diverse workplaces, markets, and project teams--foreign or domestic. Clients range from Fortune 500 companies and international professional associations, to world class universities and the U.S. Peace Corps.

For the past few years one of her major efforts has been consulting on a large curriculum for a global outsourcing firm to promote cross-cultural competence and the business case for global diversity among their U.S., Asian, and European operations. Monica has also managed the localization and worldwide delivery of global compliance and ethics initiatives in seven languages for a large agro-industry multinational company, for over 1400 of their employees on four continents. She regularly customizes country-specific programs for internationally relocating managers from leading firms, and directs culture-general development for boards of directors, international businesspeople and managers across India and the U.S. who work with multi-cultural markets and diverse employees. Monica serves, as well, on the U.S. Peace Corps’ Staging team with responsibility over pre-departure programs for Americans departing on two-year international development assignments.  

Monica’s expertise and perspective grow from work and travels in over 30 countries.  In the late 1990s she lived in Eastern Europe in Latvia as an international development consultant for engineering and infrastructure projects with multinational teams from the Baltic states, Spain, Germany, Romania, Hungary, Sweden, and Denmark. She has worked in partnership on several ventures proposed for European Union funding and closely with entrepreneurs, business leaders, technical experts, community organizers, and Ministry officials. Early in her career she was a senior program officer for the Transportation Research Board’s Transit Cooperative Research Program and a metropolitan planner with the U.S. Department of Transportation. There she directed consensus-building around policy and technical issues with the largest and most diverse communities in the U.S., and coordinated technology sharing, communication, and education programs with committees of international scope and membership.

Monica is a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer and considers it a privilege to support the American Field Service (AFS) and National Peace Corps Association. She is also a board member of the Society for Intercultural Training, Education and Research (SIETAR-USA) and professionally active in the Ethics and Compliance Officers Association; the OD Network; the Human Resource Management Association of Chicago (HRMAC;) her local chapter of the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD;) and the Professional Women's Club of Chicago.

Monica earned her Master's degree in civil engineering from the University of California at Berkeley, with a thesis focused on transportation and multi-organizational planning projects in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her undergraduate degree is from North Carolina State University in Raleigh. A brief fellowship in Sustainable Development Studies later brought her to the Institute for Future Studies in Stockholm, Sweden. Today she pursues on-going studies through the Intercultural Communication Institute in Oregon with a focus on best practices for global organizations. She resides with her husband Anthony in Chicago, Illinois USA.

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